Capturing Comments for Nintex’s Lazy Approval in Office 365

Providing solutions for customers is always a win when you can improve communication between employees. With Nintex workflows, one of the challenges many developers have with Lazy Approval on Office 365 is capturing the comments provided by Approvers in the email back to the original submitter. A task email is sent to an Approver and that Approver can only reply with the approval/rejection keywords. Any other comments in the email will be disregarded by the system. Also, there is no option to CC the original submitter in the initial task email which means the only way for an Approver to email comments back to the original submitter is by manually copying them in the approval/rejection email. This would not allow the comments to be captured along with the task. Frustration with this issue can be seen on the Nintex UserVoice site where it is one of the top voted requests. While comments cannot easily be captured if the Approver replies by email, they can be captured if the Approver customizes the Nintex task form. Simply put, the comments are captured in a workflow variable and added to the body of the email.

To accomplish this, start by creating your form and workflow. For this example, I am using the simple workflow below:

The first step is to create the text variable that will capture the comments from the custom Nintex task form. Click “Variables” from the workflow ribbon and then click “New” to create the text variable. I’m calling mine “TaskComments”.

After that has been completed, go into your “Assign a task” action and click on the “Edit Task Form” button in the ribbon.

You will be presented with the standard Nintex form that you can customize. Next, create a panel at the bottom of the form and assign a rule to hide the panel at all times. The rule should have these settings:

Add a “Calculated Value” field to the panel. This field will assign the comment to the “TaskComments” variable we created earlier. Add the Named Control called “Comment” to the Formula and set the Connected to field to the variable “TaskComments”. The settings should look like this:

Save everything. Your form should now look something like this:

Now all that is left is to add the variable to our email. Go into your “Send an Email” action on the “Rejected” branch and add the “TaskComments” variable to the body of the email. It should look something like this:

Do the same with the Approved email and you’re done. Publish the workflow and you’re good to go!